On the importance of Butscha.
You see a certain amount of hoax around the Butscha massacre (I come from the parts of Marzabotto, and we have always called these events "massacre"), and the hoax consists in the usual exchange of accusations (but some believe more people than deny there is a war?) without reflecting on the political effects.
The first political effect is that the talks in Turkey have stopped. Before Butscha, when Zelensky said that in any case it was his duty to negotiate, it was possible to admit that there was a hope, a reason, that it was reasonable for Zelensky to think that even a compromise was better than war.
And in fact, all the Italian idiots were there to say that if Zalensky had accepted an "honorable surrender", he would have spared the suffering of his people.
Butscha has completely changed this dialectic: leaving Ukraine, or even just some regions, in the hands of the Russians means transforming them into many Butschas. It is absolutely clear what their fate would be afterwards.
It is therefore obvious that:
- peace negotiations are absurd. And now Zelensky no longer has any moral duty to participate in it.
- It is no longer conceivable to end the war by handing over inhabited portions of Ukraine to the Russians.
In short, the war can only go on.
Forget therefore the compromise, resulting from the negotiations but never formalized, of not allowing Ukraine to join NATO. He'll fit in.
The fact that the war can only go on has prompted NATO to supply even more weapons of many more types. The problem is not so much that of seeking victory, but of transforming the conflict into a full-fledged proxy war.
And the Burscha events have simultaneously become the reason why Sweden and Finland want to join NATO. Putin will soon find himself on two fronts: with Ukraine in NATO, Moscow was indefensible.
If Sweden and Finland enter NATO, St. Petersburg becomes indefensible, but Kaliningrad also becomes indefensible: which is not strategic, but it is certainly a question of image. (I will talk about tactical nuclear issues later).
But the problem is: if Sweden and Finland join NATO, there is no longer any rationale for denying it to Ukraine.
So we have a chain of geopolitical consequences, all "daughters" of the Butscha massacre:
- Zelensky can insist on not handing over inhabited areas to the Russians.
- Sweden and Finland move to join NATO.
- at this point it makes no sense not to include Ukraina as well.
"Only one" massacre (I do not underestimate it, mind you), a chain of geopolitical consequences.
One thing wonders: if it is so easy for the US to say yes to Sweden and Finland, why has the attitude towards Ukraine, at least officially, always been the opposite?
The problem is what we saw on the field. On paper, the Russian army is one of the strongest armies in the world. On paper, Russian tanks are formidable means. On paper, the "tactical battalion" is a formidable formation. On paper, the new Russian weapons are deadly, very precise, very sophisticated.
The trouble is, this "test" showed a very different reality. The Russians are militarily weak (I'll talk about nuclear weapons later). The massacres against the population themselves are proof of this: during the war, while the fighting rages on, your soldiers must fight. If they spend 100% of their time fighting the enemy, we have a well-commanded and organized army.
It's not like they stop killing dogs, robbing houses, raping women and torturing civilians.
If this happens, the army is short of orders. They don't know what to do. They have days. And since no one tells them where to move and who to attack, while the enemy slaughters them because they don't sleep, then they "fight" against civilians.
The Butscha massacre is about an army not being commanded to fight other soldiers, while the enemy fights 24/7.
Had they been commanded, the Russians would have spent as much time as possible fighting Ukrainian soldiers. Not to kill pets for fear.
But in what sense do we have a weak army? This is a phenomenon that has also been seen with Italy, that is, a "stretched" army. It means that they are getting married with figs, that is, that an already tight budget is being plundered by corruption, and it is not enough to support the apparatus it supports.
What do you do when the boss orders you to have many men, many wagons, but the money is not enough because 100 leaves Moscow, and 10 remains at procurement?
Compromises must be made on quality. It means that if the prototype of a weapon was excellent, then when you buy 1000, in Russia it happens that the money is never enough. Because they are stolen. And so, we begin to save, that is to find a compromise on quality.
Poorer steel, less electronics, less training. There are obvious examples of this. Let's take the wheels of wheeled vehicles for example. armies typically have wheels with an active inflation system that strives to compensate for damage if it occurs.
Since this makes wheels very expensive, there are different types: some called "100Km", some "250Km", others "400Km". Forget the indication per kilometer, which is a flat rate: in general it is a question of different qualities of wheels.
During the exercises, which generally last a short time, 100Km wheels are used. This is because it makes no sense to consume wheels that cost much more, and therefore cheap ones are used. In a campaign that requires a lot of wear, the more expensive ones will be used. Good.
When it is said that the Russians were leaving for a drill, it is being said that they had all the equipment ready for an exercise. Including tires.
This happens when the budget is short. The Russians make columns on the streets simply because they are equipped with tracks and tires that do not resist wear, and they try to spare them. Mud has something to do with it, but as you can imagine in the military world it matters to a certain extent.
But on the more bleakly technological level, one thing has been noticed. The tactical battalion on paper is a steel fist that should crush everything and be invulnerable.
If you look at the armament, it's a steel beast. But if you look at the composition, you immediately notice that it has little more than a thousand men. A ridiculous figure. Because'?
Because it is supposed to be a "networked" battalion, that is, the vehicles are networked (as the Russian aviation does (?) With the S-400 systems), transforming it into a very fast thing: in this sense, carrying too many men slows down operations. In this scheme the btg has its own chain of command, and it behaves almost like a squadron because the non-commissioned officers deal almost exclusively with communication and data input. This had to be, and this had been said by the propaganda.
If it were, the tactical battalion would be a nightmare for any enemy. Unfortunately, however, the electronic part has been omitted.
It is as if someone in Moscow had decided that all those cool gadgets, computers and telephones weren't needed, they were just pederastic jewels: the real Russian man evidently communicates by burping and making war by shooting. The rest is a Western luxury.
The result is that a btg a kind of sitting duck unable to coordinate on the ground, with useless non-commissioned officers who, instead of using computers, electronic maps, databases of available resources and communication systems have been reused… filling up paperwork . They do the same things they were supposed to do on computers, but on paper . Thus the Ukrainians find, in the destroyed vehicles, folders and folders of bureaucracy and forms filled in, in fact, during the fight.
In this way, the cuts in electronics and telecommunications have transformed a fast and flexible iron fist into a kind of duck sitting waiting for a fox.
If they are killed, there is a reason.
Even on a strategic level, there is little. Let's take the "retreat" they are making to take Dombass, assaulting it from the east with a "power" action. Apparently, it is a new thing, a "phase two", which could also work due to a lack of forests. Aha.
It is something already seen, however:
Seriously? A battle with a strategy that was already obsolete before I was born? Stuff that didn't work in the Six Day War already, and the reasons for the Israeli victory were flexibility and speed, as it already seems to be in the Ukraine-Russia case?
It is not possible to understand where the Russian generals have ended up. Or was their prowess exaggerated by propaganda?
But what does this inability have to do with Butscha? It has something to do with it because, essentially,
The Russians no longer scare NATO so much.
Consequently, NATO will also accept Sweden and Finland internally, knowing that:
- the Russians have almost run out of men available.
- they have run out of means, and are struggling to replace them
- they have no resources for a second front.
and this is catastrophic, if the Butscha massacre pushes countries to enter NATO rather than flee it: once the Russians have been "tested" in Ukraine, things like the massacres do nothing but invite other countries to join NATO.
The massacre, that is, has set in motion a whole series of gears of which
And here we finally come to nuclear weapons. Since Putin would probably get an internal revolt if he really wanted to use strategic nuclear weapons, we have to assume that he would use tactical weapons.
But here we are delirious. It's not like if you have a weak army and add nuclear tactics, it becomes strong. On the contrary: to use nuclear tactics well, you need even more communications, even more coordination, even more strategy.
Sure, they would be capable of doing even worse damage to Western civilian infrastructure, but… if the Russian army is what we saw in Ukraine, it wouldn't last a week . They would not be able to invade Poland, so to speak. It is no longer the army of the USSR, which had 440 million inhabitants, it is that of Russia: economy in disaster, negative demographics, impoverished industrial sector.
The idea that Kaliningrad is more protected if it hosts missiles that have a range of 2600 km is stupid, for one simple reason: the enemy is, not to mention the sea, already 60 km from the city:
In a situation where your missile takes minutes and minutes to get to, I know, in France, the French may well have a border base, or a nuclear submarine right outside your port. In this situation, you wouldn't even be able to actually launch the missiles.
Moral: no, the nuclear threat is a hope of intimidation that comes from Putin, but after the show seen in Ukraine, nobody is really afraid of it. (indeed, today there are doubts that with that budget the Russians are really able to maintain all the atomic ones).
The reason is that tactical nuclear warfare is even more difficult than conventional warfare. We need better coordination, better communications, better reaction times. To say that Putin is militarily stronger if he uses nuclear weapons is like saying that he can lift ten kilos but five are too heavy.
So no, Butscha has caused quite a stir for now.